Mobile communications have advanced markedly from its earliest beginnings of providing users with a means of voice and data communication wirelessly from any location within range of a base station. This has developed into being able to provide mobile broadband connectivity to any suitable mobile device, including mobile phones, PDAs and PCs with a suitable connectivity card. Mobile broadband services can be provided on various networks, including GSM using HSDPA, UMTS, WiMaX and the currently under-development LTE network.
This improved access to such wireless services, however, has not been without its problems, particularly since there is generally not a global service scheme with a predefined tariff for services regardless of the user's location. That is, services are generally managed by service providers on a country by country basis, so that users get a “home” tariff scheme for services provided from within their home country, but different rates for other countries. The rates for other countries are generally higher than the home tariff, in order to account for various factors, such as currency exchange and termination rates to international service providers for the use of their networks.
This difference in tariff is particularly acute where users are given a quantity of inclusive data (i.e. data bundles) that they can download as part of their tariff. This free download volume, typically only applies to data downloaded within the user's home country. Whilst the user is still able to perform data downloads in other countries, these downloads are typically charged to the user based upon the amount of data downloaded (i.e. volume based charging per megabyte). Therefore, there have been instances of user's inadvertently downloading large quantities of data whilst not in their home country, and then receiving unexpectedly high bills for the services. This could occur due to the user not being fully aware of the costs involved, or unknowingly downloading the data, such as by leaving their device unlocked whilst travelling.
There is therefore a need to minimise the risk of users inadvertently tallying up such unexpectedly high bills.
Because of this problem, a related issue is in regard to data backup and restore. It has become a standard procedure for individuals and business to backup the data on their computers to a separate disk, in order to ensure data is not lost, or at least minimise the amount of data that is lost, in the event of a computer failure. Where a failure does occur, the disk can then be used to restore the data to the computer at the point at which it was last backed up.
The same procedure is now available for mobile devices, with many users now having an automatic “backup and restore” capability on their mobile computing device, which they set to intermittently back up their data wirelessly with their network provider. The types of data that would be “backed up” by uploading to a remote server include contact databases, message databases (e.g. emails, sms messages), photograph and music databases and any other data stored on the mobile devices, including documents.
This wireless backup and restore is a recommended service, in order to ensure that users do not lose any data in the event of a system failure on their mobile computing device, or even in the event of theft or otherwise losing the computing device. Where a system failure does occur, and a user needs to restore data to their mobile device, contact is made with the remote storage server in order to download the data last backed up. The remote server therefore needs a secure authorisation process to be in place to ensure that only valid users access their data.
Whilst the automatic procedure backup and restore process is manageable for users with a download/upload allowance in their home network, an issue may exist for cost sensitive users that are roaming.
To address this problem, it is possible for users to implement the backup and restore functionality manually, however a manual approach may lead to the user not backing up as often or as regularly as they should. This in turn could lead to the user inadvertently losing data.
Another problem with mobile broadband connectivity is that the service is not uniform from the perspective of download speeds. Mobile broadband cellular networks are bursty by nature, and although competitive and often superior to Ethernet and WLAN from a speed perspective, they are not dimensioned to cope with persistent and similar data volumes, such as are required during large data downloads. Therefore a user may chose to download a video clip using mobile broadband, but due to the network conditions at that given point in time, may only obtain a low download speed. This can be quite frustrating for the user, particularly if they feel they are waiting for their service longer than expected.
This same problem applies to uploading data, such as when utilising a backup data service.
Similarly, where a plurality of network types coexist, but not necessarily in the same region, a user may have access to a 3 G GPRS network in one locality, but only an “Enhanced Data rate for GSM Evolution” (EDGE) network (i.e. a 2.5 G network offering lower data speeds than 3 G) in another locality. When the faster 3 G service is not available to the user to download/upload data, the slowness of the service utilised may result in a lower user experience. It may also introduce a need for the user to optimise his use of the smaller available bandwidth.
There is therefore also a need to reduce the instances when the mobile broadband network is not able to offer an efficient download and/or upload speed.